Brief 13: Inventing interactive products
New technologies, or new combinations of technologies, offer new possibilities for interaction design. This brief is to re-imagine these technological possibilities and invent new interactive products.
For your final brief this year is to invent an interactive product using the skills and methods you have acquired this semester - create methods, prototyping techniques, code, sketching behaviour over time, communication, electronics etc. The focus is on interactive products that can only exist in the intersection of between the physical and the digital. You will be using electronics and code alongside physical form and materials to design interesting interactions. You can make any kind of product. Your products doesn't have to be useful or spectacular, but could also be about refining delightful or beautiful interactions. Work across aesthetics, functionality, expression and communication.Â
On of the major challenges with this brief is that it is very open. This means that you have to find ways of being structured in your creative process. I will be helping you with this through tutorials and mentoring about process and methods. It is very important that you are present in the studio to benefit from the teaching and from observing each other's progress.
This brief is thematically very open, but you will be working within the following constraints:
The product has to belong in a context. You have to make a product that somehow relates to human activities and environments.
Your starting-point is to use one kind of input and one kind of output. By limiting your idea process to only one sensor and one actuator, you limit the scope of your product. You might also find that this sharpens your concepts.
Your product has to be communicated.
Your product has to be experienced.
You develop your product iteratively through prototyping the experience of interacting with it. The product doesnât have to work technically all the way back, but it has to make sense as an interaction.
Remember what we have discussed about the relationships between interaction, activities and experience. Interaction design happens in contexts as a part of, or alongside our activities and experiences.
This is an individual task and these are the deliverables:
An online presentation of the product that communicates your project in detail towards a broad online audience.
This project is both about the result and the process. You all have to document you process online and book mentoring sessions with Einar.
18.11: Idea generation and idea processes. We use forced association as a method to generate lots of ideas based on combinations of sensors and actuators. We later reflect on ideas to figure out what their core bits are, and work towards turning initial ideas into directions for concepts.
20.11: First batch of decisions: Where does the process go? What technologies does the product potentially use (one in/one out). Whoever makes interesting claims for materials first gets the components they want. When we run out of specific components, we run out. Mentoring all day.
21.11: Mentoring from 12:30. Get the first mock-up/prototype done today.
Week 24.11 - 28.11:Â Book mentoring sessions with Einar throughout the week.
24.11 13:00: Lecture with Tom Vavik on Universal Design in GR1+2.
28.11 13:00: Work in progress presentations and online documentation.
5.12: Mid project presentations. Your prototypes should be near their final iteration by this date.
12.12: Collaboratively set up exhibition in the studio.
15.12: AHO Works. You have to demo you project as a part of the AHO Works exhibition.
16.12: Final presentations and demos.
discoholicmusic
2087
theartofmadeline
areudirty
titsay
jacobvanloon
